So are those tendrils composed of solid product all the way through?  Or are there unreacted compounds still trapped in the interior?

It's interesting (according to the linked page) that the mercury thiocyanate itself is not oxidized during the burning.  The heat alone triggers a decomposition into three initial products, two of which react with oxygen.

I'll put this video in my bag of tricks for my chemistry tutoring.  Thanks!

Or stick a slug of Uranium in a vat of water.  Can't forget that one.

YES!

Biggest laugh-out-loud moment was the President claiming the cuts would set medical research back a generation.

She still doesn't get it.

If she wants to teach her introverted students to "self-advocate by communicating with parents, educators, and the world at large," forcing them to speak up in front of a class full of fellow students who don't really care what they have to say is never going to work.  That's exactly the scenario the introvert either shies from or rolls his eyes at.

What she doesn't understand is that introverts are fully capable of advocating for themselves in front of others, given the right context.  If she put them in more small-group discussion situations, she would probably see them open up immediately.

And let's face it, that is a much more common situation in the world at large than the narrow skill she thinks she's trying to teach.  But as an extrovert, that fact never occurs to her.

Is this where I drop the mic?

I'm just glad it's over.  Those four months in 2012 might have been the longest scandal-free period of Notre Dame football in the last 20 years.  We're back to normal now, I guess.

And Brian, thanks for the updates on here-- you've been incredibly fair with the information you've presented.  The ultimate story, though, is the only thing that ever made a lick of sense.

Brian, to me that looks like a very bad paraphrase of Swarbrick's words by Fox News.

Dec 8 was two days after the ESPN awards ceremony in Orlando, where Te'o received a call from someone claiming to be his not-actually-dead girlfriend.  That does not mean he "found out about the hoax" then.  It means something happened that didn't make any sense.  How long would it take for that experience to turn itself into an admission that he had been duped?  It would certainly have been possible to think that the Dec 6 call was a hoax, and not have any idea what to do about it.  I can see it taking him a few weeks to wrap his mind around it, or to come to grips with months of deception.

I keep coming back to the media labelling the girl as his girlfriend in the September stories.  I haven't seen anyone point out yet where she was first identified as such-- or if there are even any pre-2012 season stories that mention a girlfriend at all.  But once every media establishment adopts that vocabulary, how can any person push back against that narrative?

(Cont'd from above)

Meanwhile, he really did think that this "girl" died of leukemia.  How do you respond to a reporter's question about her death by saying "She wasn't really my girlfriend?" without imagining that you come off as an enormous cad?  Or, how do you explain that you're only having an internet dalliance, when the reporter wants to call her your girlfriend for the story he's writing?  The stories about her death were going to be written no matter what.  Why would you want to get into the weeds, in public, about a potentially embarrassing pseud0-relationship that you were probably trying to keep private to begin with? Especially when you imagine it would only drag a dead girl's name through the mud?

I don't think Te'o is without fault here.  But I don't think he was in on the big hoax.

And I wish I could just root for my team in peace.

I don't have the time, nor the energy, to fall down this particular rabbit-hole. But thinking back to everything I read about Te'o during the season, and what I've been able to glean over the past day, here's what I think is probably close to the truth.

Te'o was probably in communication with a "girl" over the course of some time, a "girl" whose interactions with him were almost entirely a prank-- to the extent that the pranksters decided to have "her" "die" shortly after learning of Te'o's grandmother's death in September.

Te'o probably knew that the "girl"-- whom he thought was a real person rather than a concocted personality-- was not in any real sense his "girlfriend", and to the extent he allowed her to be referred to as such in the media reports in September, he can be considered culpable of perpetuating a hoax-- but only to the extent that that he knowingly allowed the relationship he thought he was having to be exaggerated in the public eye.

(Cont'd)

Time

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun... (Epic solo)

Nobody Home

I've got nicotine stains on my fingers.
I've got a silver spoon on a chain.
I've got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains.

Dogs.

You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to,
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.

And pretty much everything else, really. If you asked tomorrow, I might give a different list.

I missed the first two books (by pulling a Sajak for more than a month following the election), but this can be a New Year's resolution worth pursuing. I'm in. Let's get cultured!

Next up: you guys have to set up an Amazon affiliate link as soon as possible. You may have missed the Christmas shopping buying bonanza, but you can still cash in on the post-Christmas Amazon giftcard sales surge. For instance, I'm planning on picking up an iPad before the end of the year and I'd be delighted for a couple of bucks of that sale to be filtered your way. Make it happen!

A minor vignette from the perimeter of the strike:

I tutor kids in the Chicago suburbs for a living.  Yesterday I had a first session with a girl in the city who is currently staying home because of the strike. She said that there were some online homework assignments for her physics class we might have worked on, but their access to any online learning materials has been shut down.

Meaning, the striking teachers won't allow the students to educate themselves, either.

Now, I don't want to overstate this because I don't know all the details.  I don't know if the union or the district controls access to the site she was talking about. Heck, I don't even know what the site is (although I assume it's the same webassign site that most other schools are using). So it's possible that this was just a "caught in the crossfire" situation rather than a deliberate act by the union. Or it might even be built into the union contract as an "in case of strike" clause. I just don't know.

But I was absolutely floored when she said that.

For The Children!

Since I've Been Loving You.  Accept no substitutes.

My impression during and after the speech was that Ryan's overall theme was simple:

Stating The Obvious.

And I mean that in a good way.  What the American people needed was a clear, concise explication of the ways President Obama's actions and policies are bad for the country.  And laid out like that, it's so obvious.  We desperately need a change in leadership because our challenges need to be solved.

And just to cut the common response off at the pass: Further, the zygote is a complete organism.  So individual skin cells and fingernails are not analogous.